1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a list updating method and system, and more particularly to a technique for updating a secondary list to match a master list when platforms associated with the master list and the secondary list are different.
2. Related Art
Updating a list A from a list B in an efficient manner requires that the sort order of list A be consistent with the sort order of list B (i.e., the ordering of sort keys associated with list A needs to be consistent with the ordering of sort keys associated with list B). When list A and list B reside on different platforms, the sort orders of list A and list B can be inconsistent. For example, in a platform employing the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set, digits and upper and lower case alphabetic characters are ordered as 0-9, A-Z, a-z. In contrast, in a platform using the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) character set, the relative sort order of those same characters is a-z, A-Z, 0-9. Further, the sort order of character strings that include special characters (e.g., +, −, *, etc.) can vary among different software applications irrespective of the underlying character set. For example, if a Lotus Notes database and a DB2 database are both running in a Microsoft Windows environment, Lotus Notes sorts special characters after alphabetic characters, whereas DB2 orders most special characters before alphabetic characters. Sort keys formed from the aforementioned inconsistently sorted characters are, in turn, inconsistently sorted. When such inconsistently sorted sort keys are associated with list A and list B, and list A is being updated from list B, a less efficient update is required. This less efficient update can include the setting of flags and multiple passes through the lists to perform comparisons and modifications associated with the update. Thus, there is a need for an improved technique for updating a list from another list.